Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 129

The Age of Innocence 125 toward immediacy that Bolter and Grusin identify as having been part of Western visual culture for centuries. Scorsese’s The Age o f Innocence as a Work of Immediacy Martin Scorsese’s 1993 retelling of The Age o f Innocence was released amidst expectations for cinematic depictions of the past established by “heritage cinema,” a cycle of films which, as Ginette Vincedeau notes, began in the 1980s with such European period films as Chariots o f Fire (1981), Jean de Florette (1986), and Babette’s Feast (1987), followed by a number of films based on British novels, such as the Merchant-Ivory adaptations of the works of E.M. Forster. A second source of the cycle were 1980s British “quality television” adaptations, such as Brideshead Revisited (1981), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), and Pride and Prejudice (1980, 1995). Heritage cinema “thus refers to costume films released [since the early 1980s], usually based on ‘popular classics’ (Forster, Austen, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Zola)” (Vincendeau xvii). They are generally “shot with high budgets and production values by A-list directors and they use stars, polished lighting and camerawork, many changes of decor and extras, well-researched interior designs, and classical or classical-inspired music. Their lavish mise-en-scene typically displays the bourgeois or aristocracy . . . (xviii). One major difference between this heritage cinema and earlier costume films is a shift from the Classic Hollywood practice of using sets and costumes often merely evocative of the represented period, with no undue concern for authenticity, to “the careful display of historically accurate dress and decor, producing what one might call a ‘museum aesthetic’” (xviii). In Bolter and Grusin’s terms, this heightened attention to authenticity, in its attempt to make audiences “feel that they were ‘really’ there” (5), is an example of the medial impulse toward immediacy or transparency. The typical heritage films of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, in fact, are the epitome of the cinematic effort to satisfy the desire for an ostensibly unmediated experience of the past. In this regard, Scorsese’s film is entirely in keeping with both heritage cinema and Bolter and Grusin’s concept of immediacy. Fascinated with Wharton’s descriptions of the social rituals and physical environments of 1870s New York society, Scorsese hired nearly a dozen consultants to ensure period accuracy throughout the film. Robin Standefer, Scorsese’s visual research consultant, spent two-and-a-half years researching the minutiae of New York social life during the last